Pros
Competitive benefits package, good opportunity for a recent college grad
Cons
If you're an experienced professional, steer clear. Avanade is an Analyst factory - built around taking newly minted CS grads, hiring them at the Analyst level, and training them up to be productive contributors. Eventually. Most of their training and support programs are optimized for the inexperienced worker. One example of this is the lack of any true defined career path, and the lack of opportunity the more senior you get. In fact, the round of layoffs that occurred at the end of February saw a large number of more senior people ushered out the door. No one will admit to this, but they were just making way for a bunch of cheaper, new college grads. In spite of proclaiming that "Delivery excellence and agility are at the core of everything we do", the organization has no respect for the role of Project Managers. Instead, at least half the projects are run by some senior technical resource that has been put in place as a Delivery Lead. Yes, they go through the same delivery management training and certification process, but they lack the years of experience managing projects that actual PMs bring to the role of Delivery Leader. Further evidence of this is the increasing tendency to move the PM role to one of their off-shore organizations. After all, to Avanade, a PM is just a glorified secretary and accountant, only in place to take notes, and keep track of the project financials. The other thing that gets in the way of achieving "Delivery Excellence" is the complete disregard for a person's skillset or career interests. Avanade tends to do these "student body left!" shifts. Last year, it was Azure. This year, it's "Robotic Process Automation", or "RPA". RPA is just a fancy way of saying scheduled tasks, but you can charge a whole lot more for it when you lump it in with "AI" and "Robotics". Or, at least that seems to be the thinking of Avanade executives. But, that's not the point. My point is that, regardless of what skills you brought to the table, or professional interests you had prior to joining Avanade, you either get in line with the most recent "student body left" shift, or find yourself back on the job market when the next round of layoffs happen. You joined Avanade because you're a Sitecore developer, and you were sold on all this "digital" work Avanade is doing in Sitecore? Too bad! You're going to learn all about Active Directory and go be part of an Active Directory migration! You're going to learn all about Azure, and how to provision servers in Azure. You're going to learn Blue Prism, and how to automate business processes. You don't get on board with that, expect a bad review and no promotion. How are you achieving Delivery Excellence by staffing people who have just been through just-in-time training and have no real experience with the technology they're expected to go deliver? Expect to travel - A LOT. They'll tell you that they've moved to a "regional model" and that most travel will be in region, but the reality is, unless you happen to live near one of the few major cities where Avanade gets a lot of work, you're going to be traveling wherever there is a project that needs to be staffed. Unless you happen to work in Seattle or Chicago, you can expect to be on the road almost all the time. And there's absolutely no regard for work-life balance. You're expected to travel as the project needs. You need to be there first thing Monday morning - fine, you're traveling Sunday night! And there's no leaving early on Thursday - generally, you're not leaving the client site until after 3 PM on Thursday, so unless you happen to be staffed pretty close to your home city, you're not getting home until late. And then back at it Friday. And your Friday will be filled with training classes, Talent Community meetings and Market Unit meetings, as corporate has mandated that all non-client meetings be held on Friday. That's not a bad idea, but I bet the corporate wonks that make those decisions have any clue just how many of those non-client meetings Avanade field employees get dragged into every week. You'll read elsewhere in this forum about how things have gone downhill since Accenture "took over". That may be - I don't have the history to confirm that. I can say that my observation is that you have two organizations with completely different cultures. The majority of projects that Avanade people get staffed to are actually Accenture projects, so you can expect to have to deal with a culture that you didn't sign up for when choosing to come work at Avanade. You'll get pressured to do things that seem borderline unethical - at a minimum, they're in direct conflict with what your management staff will tell you is the right thing to do. You'll be treated like a second class citizen by these Accenture folks. Which brings me to another point: The non-field employees have no regard for the people working in the field. You try contacting an HR person or a staffing person, or even someone in your talent community management chain, and you'll be DAYS waiting for a response. More than likely, you'll have to email them multiple times before they respond. And expect some terse response that probably doesn't even address the question you asked! I don't know what it is those people are spending their time doing, but they have their priorities all wrong - their first priority should be taking care of the people interacting with and delivering to their customers. Which brings me to my last point: Staffing is a joke! In between projects, it's completely up to you to find your next project. Beginning Day 1 you are encouraged to "expand your network" to increase your odds of getting staffed. That's because the tendency of these Delivery Leads is to staff people they know. On the surface, that sounds good - you want to put the best people you can on the project, right? So, if I've worked with Sally before, and she did a good job for me, then why wouldn't I staff her? Without someone centrally advocating for a new hire to be staffed to a project, how are they ever going to be? As a result, you get these new hires that end up sitting on the bench week after week, being pressured to get themselves staffed. That's not a good way to begin a working relationship. But - for a fresh college graduate who's never experienced it done a different way, they don't know any better!
